Time & Perspective Quote by Jonathan Carroll

Beauty here isn’t framed as a pleasant attribute; it’s treated like a sudden weather event. Carroll’s “momentary effect” is the tell: he’s not arguing that women are more valuable than men, or even that beauty is fair. He’s describing a social phenomenon that hits fast, bypasses reason, and briefly reorders a room. The line works because it sounds like an observational shrug while smuggling in an indictment of how attention actually behaves.

The comparison is carefully asymmetrical. “Handsomest men” suggests the top end of male attractiveness, yet it still can’t match “a truly beautiful woman,” a phrase that implies rarity and a kind of cultural myth. “Truly” functions like a magic word, elevating beauty from good looks to something almost talismanic. Carroll’s fiction often traffics in the uncanny slipping into the everyday; this sentence does the same, turning ordinary desire into a small supernatural force that alters “the world,” even if only for a beat.

The subtext is also about power, and the discomfort of admitting where power comes from. The effect is “momentary” because it’s situational, dependent on the gaze, and potentially disposable. That temporal limit carries a quiet sadness: the woman’s influence is real but often confined to spectacle, while the man’s attractiveness is treated as less socially disruptive, more baseline.

Written by a male novelist of Carroll’s generation, it also reads as a snapshot of late-20th-century heterosexual optics: men looking, women being looked at, the room reorganizing itself around that reflex. It’s not a compliment so much as a diagnostic, delivered with the cool certainty of someone describing gravity.